Pimping gangs: How did the press represent the phenomenon in the early days?
My (co-authored) article published in the academic journal, Journalism Practice, 'Reframing Reporting of Childhood Sexual Exploitation: Three journalists reflect' (2017)
Written with Professor Sarah Niblock, then Head of Journalism at Brunel University (during my time as Visiting Journalist at Brunel University (2013-14)
A race to represent: framing and reflexivity in UK newspaper reporting of childhood sexual exploitation
This article explores national and local journalists’ experiences of reporting on child sexual exploitation by so-called ‘Asian street grooming gangs’ in UK towns and cities, with a particular emphasis on journalists framing journalists. In response to coverage of a series of cases journalists have been accused, by academics, policymakers and rival media organizations, of fixating on perpetrators’ ethnicity and creating distorted, racist media frames. Few if any studies have garnered the practitioners’ perspective on how framing occurs, so we interview journalists who have covered such cases in order to deepen our understanding of the processes and causative factors behind particular editorial angles. While offering only a snapshot view, our findings reveal individual journalists to be caught at the nexus of a range of factors that impact upon their work, both internally and externally driven. One of the authors was one of the first national journalists to draw attention to this crime.
KEYWORDS Child sexual exploitation, ethnicity, framing, grooming, newspapers, news values, race, reflexivity
Introduction
In September 2014, the British press broke the headlines contained in Professor Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, which estimated that between 1997-2013, 1,400 young girls were gang-raped, trafficked, threaten, beaten and forced to bring other girls into abuse networks. The victims and the authorities knew that “by far the majority of perpetrators were ‘Asian’” (2), reflecting a mere 3.7 per cent of Rotherham’s 260,000 population but with easy access to vulnerable girls by virtue of their work in the town’s taxi industry. Jay found “councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.” (2) Yet prior to this report, which proved through internal documents that virtually all in positions of authority knew the scale and nature of exploitation from the late 1990s onwards, journalistic coverage of the trials of groups of men accused of organised sex abuse of underage girls in UK towns and cities has prompted a national outcry amongst politicians, police, social workers and academics concerned about damaging race relations. A prominent researcher in this field, Ella Cockbain of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science and University College London, cites the January 5, 2011, front page expose by The Times, a leading UK broadsheet newspaper, as pivotal in the construction of so-called “on-street grooming” as a new crime threat associated with “Asian sex gangs” who, it is claimed, deliberately seek out white British girls for repeated and horrific sexual abuse. (2013, 23). The headline, “Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”, stated the threat of “on-street grooming” was a “plague on northern towns” with large, segregated Asian communities. White working-class girls were being targeted, but the authorities were failing to tackle offending for “fear of being branded racist”. Cockbain identifies that until the 2010 trials “previous coverage had typically been localized, sporadic and comparatively low profile, and defendants’ race was rarely discussed.” (24) Thereafter, she asserts the news media have tended to fixate on race as their driving news frame, either presenting grooming as a racial crime threat or challenging the basis of that assertion.
Framing is one of the most abiding theories in journalism studies, typically used to examine the most salient themes in media texts. Whether “terrorist violence” in foreign policy coverage or “benefits scroungers” in UK reports on social welfare, frames define problems, diagnose causes and make moral judgments (Entman 1993, 52). According to one part of this theory, communicators such as journalists make value judgments consciously or unconsciously influenced by frames that organize their own belief systems. These frames are transposed into their news items through the inclusion or absence of certain vocabulary, images and sources. Despite the wealth of scholarship envisioning and deconstructing theoretical models of framing, few if any academic researchers have engaged journalists themselves in the research process so as to assess the validity of the models or refine them further.
Accordingly, the authors interviewed three prominent journalists about their experiences, motivations and challenges faced in reported organized child sex abuse cases. We interviewed Andrew Norfolk of The Times, whose reporting of these cases prompted most criticism from rival media, academics and policymakers who accused it of fuelling racism. We also interviewed Ben Rossington, now of the Mirror, the first and one of the only journalists to investigate the 2003 disappearance and murder of Blackpool schoolgirl Charlene Downes. In addition, we interviewed Samira Ahmed, broadcaster and journalist, who undertook in-depth reports and media commentary on childhood sexual exploitation by organized groups. The research does not focus in any depth on the framing of the victims of these crimes – that is part of the bigger project of which this study forms but one aspect.[i] While only offering a snapshot of reporting experiences, these journalists’ reflections provide a fascinating glimpse of the internally and externally driven factors that influence editorial practice. Most significantly in this case, we found that while all three were to some extent delimited in the scope of their reporting by access to sources, the major amount of framing occurred after their stories, particularly Norfolk’s and Rossington’s, were published. Specifically, those journalists’ work was re-framed by rival media and a variety of interest groups including politicians and professionals away from the experiences of the child victims towards a national debate about the ethnicity of the alleged perpetrators of the offences. This sheds some light on the urgent need to encourage journalists to become involved in research reflexively in order to deepen our understanding of the insidious nature of framing. We sought to integrate framing research with the practitioner voice, one small step in meeting Entman’s demand (1993, 58) that framing research contribute to “social theory in the largest sense” by illuminating some occupational, social and political challenges to investigative crime reporting in the public interest.
Reporting the “Asian sex gang predator”
Criticism of The Times’ reporting was connected to investigations into the scale of on-street grooming against underage girls as young as 11 in towns and cities across the UK, including Rotherham, Derby, Telford, Oxford and Rochdale. The trial of five men who abused girls in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, in 2010 prompted particular debate about alleged links to the ethnicity of the perpetrators. After the men were jailed, police and social services were criticized for their handling of and failure to prevent the abuse. On September 23, 2012, The Times cited a confidential 2010 report by the police intelligence bureau which discussed “a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally” which was “particularly stressed in Sheffield and even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females.” It also referred to an unpublished document from the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board that stated that the “crimes had 'cultural characteristics...which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity”. South Yorkshire Police denied these accusations saying that The Times was wrong, and that to suggest the police force was deliberately withholding information was “a gross distortion and unfair on the teams of dedicated specialists working to tackle the problem.” (BBC 2012)
Prior to The Times’ controversy, there had been little national reporting of such crimes. When Charlene Downes, 14, went missing in her hometown of Blackpool, Lancashire, in 2003, the only media investigating her disappearance was the local newspaper, the Blackpool Gazette. At the time Charlene went missing in November, police believed she was part of a group of young teens performing sex acts for adults in return for fast food, money, gifts and alcohol in an area known locally as “Paki Alley”, a racist term used by those who were unhappy with the fact that the majority of takeaway businesses were run by men from minority ethnic backgrounds. In 2007, two takeaway shop owners went on trial charged with Charlene’s murder with the prosecution claiming, based on secret recordings, that her body was minced into kebabs. A first jury failed to reach a verdict while a retrial was abandoned and the defendants were cleared after massive police failings were uncovered (IPCC, 2009)
Blackpool Gazette crime reporter Ben Rossington investigated, when newsroom resources permitted, the background of Charlene’s own family. He uncovered evidence that the family had been known to social services in another part of the UK and that while Charlene had been identified as at risk of sexual abuse as in infant in that authority, she was only deemed at risk of physical abuse in Blackpool. The better-resourced national media, he claims, only became interested in the case when a police officer revealed lurid details of the possibility that Charlene’s body was disposed of via a kebab meat grinder.
Framing and reflexivity
Carragee and Roefs (2004) contend that a number of trends in framing research have neglected the relationship between media frames and broader issues of political and social power (214). Newspapers present frames of reference that readers use to interpret and discuss public events (Tuchman 1978, ix) According to Neuman, Just and Crigler (1992) “they give the story a ‘spin’…taking into account their organisational and modality constraints, professional judgments and certain judgments about the audience.” (120) According to Donsbach (1981), journalists actively construct frames to make sense of incoming information. Furthermore, as avid news consumers, journalists are said to be particularly prone to frames other media use to describe events and issues. Studies of media frames as dependent variables have examined the role of various factors on influencing the creation or modification of frames (Scheufele 1999, 107). Journalists’ framing of an issue may be influenced by social-structural or organisational variables (Shoemaker and Reece 1996) and by individual or ideological variables (Tuchman 1978). While stories involving the vulnerable contain intrinsic newsworthiness (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Niblock 2005), the more recent construction of the Asian sex gang predator harks back to the notion of folk devils, similar to the racialisation of street robbery into “mugging” examined by Cohen and Young (2011). As such, Cockbain suggests the ideological dimensions of multiculturalism, political correctness and Islamaphobia post 9/11 and 7/7 sowed the seeds for this moral panic. (op. cit. 25)
While many studies of media frames focus on the perceived effects of the meaning-making, this study focuses on the factors that might influence journalistic frames. Drawing on Scheufele (1999, 108) we examined:
• What factors influenced the way the journalists framed the organized child sex abuse cases?
• How does the framing process work in journalistic practice?
Researchers have identified at least five factors that may potentially influence how journalists frame an event or issue, including organizational pressures, newsroom routines, pressures from influential sources, the ideological or political leanings of the journalists and the social norms or values of any given context (Bennett, 1991, Edeleman, 1993, Shoemaker and Reece 1996, Tuchman, 1978). Edelman (1993), for instance, posited that framing is “driven by ideology and prejudice” (232), while Gamson and Modigliani (1987) suggested that journalists’ deadlines led to reliance on the availability of official sources with particular ideologies. As Rhodebeck (1998) posited “there is reciprocity in framing…” (5). He concurs with Fishman’s (1980) earlier conception of “news waves” whereby certain local crime trends are latched upon by the mass media and become national issues. Gitlin (1980) said that journalists are as subject to “largely unspoken and unacknowledged” frames as much as the public who receive their reports (7) According to his theorization, media frames are constituted and naturalised as working routines for journalists that allow them to organize information and “package it for efficient relay to their audiences” (7). As such, the motives of the sender may be unconscious (Gamson 1989). However, there is very little scholarship involving journalists in exploring these conscious or unconscious determinants of media framing. As a team of practitioner-academics, the authors were keen to speak with reporters who covered the story to find out what factors, if any, impacted on their editorial angles, choice of sources, vocabulary and more. We wanted to assess the extent to which the journalist was autonomous or otherwise in seeking to report information accurately, particularly in relation to the ethnicity of alleged perpetrators and victims. In doing so, we were responding to Carragee and Roefs’ (2004) concern that researchers have neglected the relationship between media frames and broader issues of political and social power. Some studies examine framing only by virtue of measuring story topics, attributes, or issue positions and thereby “divorce media frames from the context in which they are produced including the influence of power on frame production” (217). However, despite these in depth theorizations, few if any studies have interviewed journalists themselves about the news making and framing process.
Philosopher Donald Schön, who made a remarkable contribution to the theory and practice of learning, urged that “in the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp.” (1987, 3) Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000) warn the high ground approach to research, where academics examine the processes and products of journalism from the outside (Niblock 2007), leads to a one-way street whereby research subjects are unable to feed back on whether the study is useful. Contextualisation of research findings to the practitioner world is essential (Wood et. al. 1998) or the research/researched relationship becomes elitist. Journalism research methods that are interactive, iterative and which rest on a dynamic communicative partnership between academics and practitioners, offer the best way for understanding change in our dynamic field.
Praxis is a particular philosophy used to guide and conduct research, which engages an individual or group under study in the research process (Tierney and Sallee, 2008). Barkho and Saleh (2013) provide a detailed explanation of praxis, including its manifestation through the work of several abiding sociologists of media and the public sphere, which highlights the need for reflexive approaches. The research can be explored as part of wider engagement that goes beyond the researcher/subject relationship, and becomes instead co-operative enquiry (Reason and Rowan 1981). To reach this position requires revising the prevailing view within journalism studies that re-search is delimited by formats and outcomes and to envision journalism research as the articulation of a process. Work in disciplines such as education, nursing and arts, such as Niedderer and Roworth-Stokes’ analysis of creative practice, makes clear the benefits of understanding practice as scholarship “from the insider’s point of view with the context of their own language.” (2007, 4)
One of the useful characteristics of praxis-based research for journalism researchers from an industry background is that it uses personal reflection as a key data source (Mayo 2006). When a researcher is in dialogue with practice, the material that emerges may be novel to both even though both parties were already familiar with the “facts”. A reflexive approach involves making explicit the tacit knowledge or theory that underpins all practice, even in split second editorial decisions. It aims to improve future practice through a better understanding of how context, experiences, history, can impact quite profoundly on journalism and media production at any given moment. It is a lengthy process requiring academics to establish mutually beneficial relationships with industry partners. In this way we can deepen our awareness of how, within practice, we find embedded cultural influences, personal experiences and aspirations (Hawke 1996, 35; Jeffries 1997, 5) (cited in Stewart, 2001).
Reflections on action
Through in depth semi-structured interviews, we sought to ascertain the extent, if any, to which the journalists were aware of and affected by:
1) organizational pressures
We asked the journalists a series of questions to ascertain the process by which angle of the story was arrived at. We were keen to determine whether this was a subjective or collective process and, if the latter, who else was involved. Once the raw story text was filed to the news desk, we asked whether the story remained true to their version or whether it was edited and, if so, by how much. We also ascertained how fast the journalists were required to deliver the copy, and whether there any production factors they had to consider, such as search engine optimisation or availability if images.
2) sources
Our next questions enquired as to the journalists’ main sources of information, albeit mindful of their need to protect vulnerable sources’ identity. We established which sources were the most available or difficult to contact.
3) professional pressures
We wished to establish what extrinsic (Niblock 2005) factors may have affected their reporting, including whether they were you conscious of how other media and their competitors were reporting the stories and if that impacted their own approach.
Each interview was recorded and transcribed and we present some of the salient aspects here.
Ben Rossington
Ben Rossington worked on the Charlene Downes story between 2004 and 2006 as crime reporter for the Johnston Press-owned Blackpool Gazette, his second job in journalism. He then moved onto the Liverpool Echo for five years and is now a staff reporter for the Mirror. Ben won News Reporter of the Year in 2012, and was previously nominated twice. Rossington described initially intending to report the Charlene Downes missing person’s enquiry as a straight news report when he took on the role of crime reporter. Through interviews with a variety of sources, a more concerning picture emerged: “a lot of the stuff that I found out was a bit of a shock to the newsroom.” He described how the everyday routines of a busy local newsroom meant a fast turnaround of copy was required:
The thing with the Gazette was it’s a great paper but it’s not the Mirror or Sun or The Guardian or whatever. It goes in for ‘let’s just get a paper out every single day’. I’d go and do some digging and then by 3pm I’ve filed and it’s in the day’s paper. With the Gazette it’s so hand to mouth that there was no other way of doing it.” And I was new to the crime beat, I’d still only been a journalist for about 18 months properly, and there was always that thing of ‘we have to be very, very careful’.
While Rossington’s coverage of the missing girl, by necessity of production schedules and professional routines, comprised regular updates - such as new comments from the parents on anniversaries of her disappearance or birthdays rather than new evidence gleaned through investigation - a pattern still emerged. Rossington lived and socialized in the town and gradually built up a picture: “People in the leisure industry, who were open until four, five in the morning would see all this – the girls, 12 or 13, wandering the streets and getting out of cars.” He also spoke to a madam who was aware of underage girls in rival brothels. Despite the information emerging from these sources, he describes facing obstacles from officialdom such as hastily called press conferences yet with little to impart.
The Gazette was not especially interested in the ethnicity of the suspects, according to Rossington:
We looked at the whole takeaway side of things but we never actually squirrelled it down to nationalities, ethnicities, anything like that. For the Gazette readership, two blokes getting arrested doesn’t matter where they are from as long as they’ve got Blackpool addresses. Nowadays obviously, we’d [look into it] but there was never any time to go off diary. If I spent a week off diary the paper wouldn’t get out.
For Rossington, the production values and constraints of local news budgets compared with national media resources mean he would be able to spend at least a week focussing on an investigation like this.
Knowing these types of pieces that have been in The Times I now have a much better understanding out how these pieces come about. At the time, back in Blackpool, still a [new] reporter, I just thought it was all wrapped up in a couple of hours that way I had to do it. I didn’t realise people get months to spend on background..
At the time no other media were reporting the case, but Rossington has continued to investigate the case for more than a decade. In 2011, in the wake of Andrew Norfolk’s revelations about Rochdale, it emerged in leaked documents that police knew at the time of Downes’ disappearance that up to 60 underage girls were being sexually exploited by workers at takeaway food outlets in the town. “It was only when rumours started circulating…then the News of the World were up in Blackpool for the weekend, ” said Rossington. This followed police reports of arrests and suggestions that the girl had been murdered and her body destroyed in a mincer.
Despite more extensive resources, however, few national journalists paid much attention to the issue of childhood sexual exploitation by groups, with few exceptions including one of the authors of this paper (NAME LEFT OUT) and The Times’s Andrew Norfolk.
Andrew Norfolk
Andrew Norfolk began journalism as an indentured trainee at the Scarborough Evening News in 1989. He joined the Yorkshire Post in 1995 and The Times in 2000. He won the 2012 Orwell Prize and the Paul Foot award for investigative and campaigning journalism for his work exposing the targeting, grooming and sexual exploitation of teenage girls. He spent three years investigating gangs of men in the north of England who preyed on vulnerable girls and the failures of state agencies to protect them and to prosecute the offenders. His articles prompted two government-ordered inquiries, a parliamentary inquiry and a new national action plan on child sexual exploitation. Police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and local authorities were told to transform their approach to street-grooming offences, leading to extra resources, improved training for frontline staff and a rapid rise in the number of investigations and prosecutions. The government also ordered a review of protection for residents of children's homes.
Norfolk told us that he took a forensic approach to seeking the truth but, in turn, his reporting was framed by rival media, academics and interest groups to appear as if his primary interest was in the ethnicity of the alleged offenders. One of the most contentious aspects of his reporting was when The Times cited statistics alleging a trend: of 56 offenders convicted across seventeen trials between 1997 and 2011, “three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and the majority were members of the British Pakistani community”. (Norfolk, 2011a) Cockbain suggested the sampling was indicative a conscious effort to skew the picture: “These inclusion parameters have never been explained or justified despite the questionable decision to exclude male victims wholesale. This raises the question as to whether the statistical exercise was deliberately designed to isolate evidence for a predetermined ‘Asian model’.” (2013, 27) Norfolk’s main mission, he told us, was to show how inaction by police and social services allowed the crime to proliferate in northern towns. “If the angle was directed at anybody it was more at the institutions that knew and didn’t do anything rather than the men who were actually doing it.” Throughout his reporting, Norfolk went to great lengths to emphasize that the majority, around 94%, of online ‘grooming’ of underage children and young people in the UK was perpetrated by lone white males.
Norfolk’s first awareness of this CSE model was in 2003 when Ann Cryer MP raised concerns about abuse in her Keighley, West Yorkshire, constituency. He was also approached by the leader of a group of mothers many years before events reached the public domain. Norfolk explains:
Part of what has driven me all the way through is guilt at my inaction back then, because I didn’t want to believe her. I really didn’t. It was just too…the fact that these were all – and it was always that very loose word – ‘Asians’, terribly loose and terribly upsetting to a lot of people when it is inaccurately used, because it was so much more specific than that. You immediately just saw it as a dream story for the Far Right.
The Times ran his front page story on the unpublished police report about the Charlene Downes case on 7 April 2011, before he began his detailed investigation into the Rochdale scandal (2011b). Norfolk described being propelled to interrogate a perceived trend in the crime after hearing charity spokespeople and others denying a pattern in the offending. He was allowed three months off-diary:
Because it was such a poisonously contentious issue, we decided that the first piece had to be based on as concrete evidence as we could get. A lot of that was simply a trawl through court records and library archives looking for anywhere in England where two or more men had been convicted of offences against girls aged 12 to 16, where it wasn’t internet, where the first meeting has been a street corner outside shopping malls, bus stops, train stations.
Norfolk described how routine, laborious journalism enabled his deeper understanding of the workings of the justice system and the care system:
“So much of the best stuff came from just sitting in on weeks of trials. Rochdale went on for three months and every day I wasn’t there we paid someone to sit in.” However only he was present apart from sporadic visits from other newspapers or agencies. He ascribes his presence in courtrooms as an education in the care home system, its management, ownership and accountability.
He described the only degree of framing that he consciously applied during that three-month investigation:
We have a [computer research] programme where you can put in different sequences of words like ‘crown court’ and then variations of phrases that might have fit the pattern…’girls’, ‘alcohol’, ‘cars’, ‘cannabis’. There were about 56 men, and 53 out of the 56 were Asian names, and almost 50 were Muslim names. And as I looked into each case, the vast majority were of Pakistani origin – they weren’t Indian-Muslim, they weren’t Bangladeshi. And then I started trying to talk to people, professionals. That was the real learning curve because no-body – but nobody, no police force - had talked about it. I had done weeks of emails and ‘phone calls trying to explain to them and their press offices that I had these figures and wanted to know what pattern – if any – and they point blank refused to let anyone speak to me even off the record about their work.
Norfolk describes setting up meetings with official sources who would pull out at the last minute. His best sources, he said, were the parents’ group CROP (Coalition for the Removal of Pimping, now renamed Parents Against Child Sexual Exploitation) and one senior police officer who was moved off the investigation he had been heading:
It was really old fashioned stuff – driving somewhere, talking, spending hours and hours building relationships with these families, very intense relationships with the parents usually, sometimes with the girl who was in her late teens or early twenties looking back on what had happened. I did have some good Pakistani contacts, mainly young lads disgusted by the others. I got introduced to a guy who ran a bar and he just took me under his wing. He was genuinely disgusted by these men so he put me in a room and just summoned everyone he thought would be worth talking to.
Norfolk’s drawing attention to cultural issues was reframed as racial by rival media and groups seeking to discredit his findings. Researcher Helen Brayley, a colleague of Ella Cockbain’s, wrote an article for the Huffington Post on November 21, 2013, discrediting The Times’ reporting the day after an Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s report, playing down any link between perpetrator ethnicity and grooming: “Is this political correctness trumping justice once again, or are some groups increasingly so caught up with ‘Asian sex gangs’ that they cannot accept evidence that CSE is a broader, more diverse phenomenon than Rochdale-type offending groups alone?” (Brayley 2013)
A number of journalists were outspoken in their criticism of Norfolk’s reporting, with The Guardian being the main vehicle for opposition. Libby Brooks wrote on Jan 7, 2011: “The Times has been going out of its way and using dodgy evidence to portray Pakistani Muslim men as perpetrating a huge amount of sexual abuse of children…” Laurie Penny, in a piece on The Guardian's Comment is Free website entitled "This isn't ‘feminism'. It's Islamophobia” (December 22, 2013) claimed that the “language of feminism has been co-opted by Islamophobes, who could not care less about women of any creed or colour…Horror stories about Muslim misogyny have long been used by western patriarchs to justify imperialism abroad and sexism at home.”
The accusation put forward by Penny and others is that those who ascribe particular significance to the ethnicity of the perpetrators are racist/Islamaphobic. For instance, Ella Cockbain and her co-researcher Helen Brayley wrote a comment piece for The Guardian on May 8, 2012, juxtaposing criticism of The Times’ reporting with the presence of far-right groups in courtrooms. (Cockbain and Brayley, 2012)
Two months later, The Guardian’s commentator Joseph Harker accused the journalists covering these cases of claiming that there is something inherently perverted about Muslim or Asian culture (Harker, 2012). He repeated his concerns 10 months later in the same outlet (Harker, 2013) where he frames his entire argument on the notion that The Times suggested that the white community is never called to task when white abusers are exposed and that the coverage suggests that these men are abusing children because they are Asian. In contrast, Norfolk said that The Times’ reporting suggested that the perpetrators were acting opportunistically, not because they are Asian, and that the police and white liberals were shielding the ethnicity of these abusers. In fact the subsequent commissioning of the Jay inquiry was entirely down to Norfolk’s reporting, as admitted by the new leader of Rotherham council during his evidence to the Commons communities and local governmentt select committee in October 2014 (Jay 2014). Ironically, two days after the report's publication on August 26, 2014, Norfolk was named-checked and praised in a Guardian leader column.
Samira Ahmed
Samira Ahmed is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years’ experience in print and broadcast. She has worked as a reporter on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and BBC2 Two’s Newsnight. She made the acclaimed Channel Four documentary Islam Unveiled. As well as presenting BBC Newswatch, she is a regular media commentator. Her writing for the national press and their websites includes features, interviews and analysis on culture, politics and social affairs for The Independent, The Guardian and for The Spectator website. She has written numerous articles on childhood sexual exploitation by groups.
Ahmed says she was delimited in her attempts to report by a social worker in Bradford in 2005:
Race has been used as a way to shut down any discussion that this abuse is going on, I think. I was told it was racist to talk about any issues of abuse at home. I’m convinced, particularly from that seminal moment, with that social worker, that there was a cultural attitude within the local authority, which was to treat it as if it was racist to talk about these things.
Ahmed believes that council and police forces conflated race and culture which was in turn mirrored in the reporting by certain newspapers:
I’ve been amazed by the number of pieces in The Guardian in particular which have gone out of their way to say it’s got nothing to do with race. When I wrote my piece I got a message on Twitter from someone who considers themselves a friend of mine who’s white and middle class, saying, ‘no, Samira, you’ve got it all wrong, it’s not about race, you need to read this piece by this middle class, upper middle class white bloke who’s written a piece in The Telegraph about why it’s not really about race’. And I thought I could either point out the irony of being lectured by him on this, or I could just say, ‘Look, I know what you’re trying to say but if the council and the police are conflating race and culture, then it’s entirely relevant,’ and that’s what seemed key to me. This is just about misogyny. It’s just about men feeling as if they can treat women this way. It’s about class, because officials feel like it’s OK to treat them like scum, and they get trapped in the system which is hard enough to navigate if you’re really educated and have resources to have good lawyers. We know that Asian girls are being groomed, but the shame culture was even greater there. So they didn’t even dare report it. The white girls reported it, and they got ignored.
Ahmed notes a sharp contrast in the reporting of the cases even within the BBC, to the extent that many people heard of the story via right-wing organisations and accused the BBC of covering it up:
When I presented Newswatch we did a story about the Oxford grooming gang. Loads of viewers complained, and I watched the report, and it didn’t mention the ethnicity of the abusers once, until really far in and then very quickly, casually, and I think viewers had a point which is it feels like you’re deliberately uncomfortable about this and don’t want to talk about it. But the BBC Asian Network, by comparison, had a female reporter who went out and did a report, vox-popped women on the street, Asian women, British Asian women, who were saying, ‘you know what, we walk down the street, we feel intimidated. There are men leering at us, there are men making comments about how we dress. There’s a whole culture of sexual intimidation.
Newsroom cultures may also impact on editorial judgement, says Ahmed:
I can remember conversations in [a] newsroom, where I was told we couldn’t have two stories about these hideous abusive murders of women on the same bulletin, because that would be too much for the viewer. But you think hang on, how many boring stories do we run about Westminster minutiae, but these are two really important cases that reveal something about police failings, about a pattern of abuse? And yet they won’t run them, and they can justify it, and somehow their view is neutral.
Samira Ahmed
Discussion
Our interviews reveal insights on two levels. First, they illuminate practical issues about the extent to which newsroom resources and routines impact on journalists’ ability to report in depth. Second, they draw attention to the ways in which abiding approaches to framing are confirmed or contradicted in practice. In terms of the first point, both journalists draw attention to the crucial role that local reporting plays in building and beckoning the trust of local sources and in holding officialdom to count. Yet the routines and lack of resourcing in local and regional journalism mean that reporters have no time to go off diary and are, instead, required to supply a regular stream of copy, usually single sourced. It is significant that neither journalist sought to interrogate the psychological dimensions of repeated abuse. While Norfolk describes how he managed to build a working relationship with victims and their families, there is a tendency within journalism to deliver testimonies without deeper analysis of the causes. This points to a trend within reporting to focus on the crime, the justice system and the perpetrators possibly at the expense of telling insights about the pervasive dimensions of abuse and how difficult it was for the girls to resist. It was evident, from most of the journalistic and official literature emanating from the cases, that here was little insight into the lives and perspectives of the girls or their families. In such important cases as the protection of the vulnerable and the uncovering of crime and systemic failure, news organisations would do well to reappraise their competitive drive and consider co-operation.
In terms of the second level of analysis, Rossington’s experiences of having to quickly package information for efficient relay confirms Gitlin’s account of naturalised newsroom routines (1980). His framing those arrested in connection with the murder of Charlene Downes was determined, as Shoemaker and Reece (1996) would assert, according to organizational variables of locality as a primary news value. It is questionable, however, the extent to which any of the journalists’ approaches supports Neuman, Just and Crigler’s notion of spin. None were driven by a need to promote the story to their news desks or for career building purposes. Indeed Norfolk candidly revealed he was so disturbed by the story that he asked his editor to reassign him, “but he always managed to talk me out of it.” Rossington revealed that he did not even include his Downes research and reporting in the portfolios he supplied to his future editors in job applications. In the Downes case, the spin seemed to follow a police officer revealing the way they believed her body had been disposed of. There as also apparent spin in the media story that ensued after The Times published its statistics. The story became about media reporting as opposed to the plight of the victims.
Carragee and Roefs’ concern about media frames and broader issues of social and political power are reflected in the interviewees’ accounts of difficult access to key sources. They both described quickly arranged police media briefings and being refused interviews. In both cases, Far Right groups leapt upon the story and seized the opportunity for publicity, enlisting the support of the parents of Charlene Downes and organising events and picture opportunities for them such as a memorial service reported in the local press. Yet Norfolk insisted his interest in the ethnicity of the alleged criminals was not about castigating a race group but about showing that agencies charged with preventing crimes were not investigating a possible factor in how grooming was conducted. In Rossington’s case especially, it seems that he was reliant on those sources who would make themselves available due to his organisation’s deadlines (Gamson and Modigliani1987).
In terms of Donsbach’s assertion that journalists actively construct frames, we find a mixed picture. While each journalist appeared to be judging the story on its intrinsic merits, there is evidence of rival media actively reframing. The Guardian published a correction to its own reporting of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner a month later (Butler, 2012) This evidence’s Rhodebeck’s assertion of reciprocity in framing though extends it beyond opening and editorial space for outside groups’ ideologies, but to a consideration of rivalry between competing outlets. The Guardian, which was investigating telephone hacking at News International, the owners of the The Times and its sister titles including the News of the World, featured Ella Cockbain, then a PhD student, as an authoritative academic blogger criticising Norfolk’s approach as lacking in scientific credibility. As such, in future academic discussions about media framing, we need to take on board competition and the general political/economic context of the media at any given moment. It may not have been a causative factor in framing of these stories but cannot be discounted without deeper investigation. At the time of the Jay report, The Guardian’s Hugh Muir still contested key evidence: “The reasons victims were ignored in Rotherham probably had more to do with overstretched social workers and a classic lack of concern about working class children being the victims of sexual offences than it did with a desire to be politically correct.” (Muir, 2014)
Conclusion
By involving journalists directly in our study, we identify how a reflexive approach to framing research can improve our understanding of the interaction between social forces, institutions and individual news reporters. We asked questions examining the processes by which news stories are “a site on which various social groups, institutions, and ideologies struggle over the definition and construction of social reality” (Gurevitch and Levy 1985, 18). What we find is that news reporting is a site in which various actors compete to dominate the frame, and that the ability to dominate rests on a range of internal editorial and external political conditions at any given moment. We also find re-sources to be significant in whichever frame will gain precedence. Ultimately, what we deduce is a need to see frames as more than simply story topics. In the case of child sexual exploitation and its association with ethnicity, we find a dynamic process of journalistic framing at play but also a careful and deliberate re-framing of journalistic frames by rivals and key institutions that would not have been apparent but for reflexive engagement with reporters. This differs considerably, and is a much richer idea, from the concept that framing is the second level of agenda setting (McCombs, Llamas, Loped-Escobar and Rey 1997).
Our study examines framing in journalism as a social process, which speaks to Goffman’s (1974) perspective on framing based on his close scrutiny of the informal and formal rules of social interaction. These frames, he observed, are dynamic and fragile. While journalists are engaged in the construction of meaning, their editorial processes are set within and, in part, determined by these wider contexts. This draws attention to the significance of organizational structures, communication networks and resources in sustaining accurate, forensic reporting in the public interest.
This practice-led approach, whereby reflection is implicit in action, is helpful in exposing how the practical act of “thinking on your feet” in a journalism setting is in fact the enactment of a sophisticated process of judgment borne out of experience. It assists by countering any suggestion that the journalist does not think, they just “do”. Sheridan Burns takes the notion of reflective practitioner a step further by positing that journalists need to be mindful of the wider context within which they report: “Reflection is also the process by which journalists learn to recognise their own assumptions and understand their place in the wider social context” (2003, 33). This runs in parallel with academics seeking to forge mutually beneficial and illuminating research relation ships with media partners.
NOTES
[1] While Cockbain and others have been concerned about the apparent framing of these stories primarily in terms of the ethnicity of the perpetrator since around 2011, another disturbing frame concerning us is the general lack of coverage of these types of cases much earlier coupled with the lack of attention placed on the personal situations and systematic coercion of the individual child victims. With a few notable exceptions, prior to the collapse of the Charlene Downes murder trial local grooming of girls received hardly any journalistic coverage.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2016.1164613